How to Ensure a Perfect Forecast From Your Pipeline

UPilot updates all your forecasting and other reporting in real-time. This means that more accurate the data on a daily basis inside the CRM, more accurate your reporting will be.

The pipeline is one the major areas from which a forecast is calculated. It shows not only the amount of deals that can be won in a given time-frame, but also the amount that you can expect from the deals every month, quarter, or year.

Below, we will take a look at some of the different things constituting your deals and your pipeline which directly impact your sales forecast and also how to keep it perfectly updated.

1. Keep Your Deals in the Correct Stages

Your sales process and your Pipeline in UPilot go hand-in-hand. As the deals move forward on your sales process, the probability that they will close also goes up. Likewise, as the probability goes up, the forecast would also be updated.

For this, you will need to have the stages set in UPilot that correspond to your sales process. You can customise your pipeline for your account by adding different stages, renaming them, or even changing the probability associated with each stage.

Thus, as the deals move forward, they should also be updated in your pipeline using the simple drag-and-drop system in UPilot CRM.

2. Expected Closing Date
The Expected Closing Date (ECD) refers to when you expect the deal in question to close. This closely relates to your sales cycle and has a direct impact on your sales forecast as well.

Let’s say you have a deal worth USD 50,000 that you expect to close on February 1 of next year which is currently stated as at a 10% probability. This means that at the current time, you have a forecast of USD 5,000 (10% of the deal value) in February for this deal.

However, once we reach the month February, and you believe that the deal would instead be closing in March, you will need to update the ECD to have the perfect forecast.

Deals which are ‘Overdue’ (whose ECDs have already passed) will not be considered in your forecast. Thus, it is imperative you update the ECD if you believe that the deal will be closing later.

3. Keep The Payment Dates Accurate
Quite often, you will have a deal structured wherein you will have multiple payments coming in. These may be a one-time payment on signing of the contract with a monthly maintenance fee, a deal with multiple payments based on a milestone reached, or even a monthly subscription basis.

To have the perfect forecast, you can add a payment date in the deal itself such that your forecast would show up in the correct month.

This article is a part of the ‘Accurate Forecasting’ series. Articles in this series include: